Archive
Jane Bussmann on charities: she moved to Africa to be a good person and ended up hating the professionally good.
I loved charities until I moved to Africa. In fact I wanted to work for a charity, any charity that would have me. By charities, I don’t mean Mrs. Miggins and her mobile library van. Although there should be some authority somewhere on God’s green earth checking what Mr. Miggins is doing in the back […]
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David Quantick asks is oo err missing because it’s just going too fnar, fnar?
When I was a lad, all comedy was double entendre. All of it. Every single aspect of British culture had been fed through a Carry On filter, Donald McGillised and nudge nudged with a wink wink. If you didn’t have a double entendre, as the old joke goes, you could ask someone to give you […]
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Andrew McGibbon wonders what it’s like being looked down on by half the world’s population.
In the absence of a war economy, the great military corporations of the latter half of the 20th century, turned their plants, returning manpower and considerable resources to selling a peacetime economy. “We desperately need!” was replaced with “You desperately need!” The Western economies ploughed their swords into shares. Along with the seductive, pubertal explosion of […]
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Louise Morris reveals why political dissent in the Honduran capital Tegucigalpa, isn’t music to the ears of the right wing government
The city’s sprawl is vast, 77.6 square miles of grinding poverty and violent desperation, a transit point for cocaine smuggling into the US, and the centre of a new cultural boom. This is Tegucigalpa, Honduras. With the highest murder rate in the world it is unsurprising that art is not a national priority. But if […]
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David Quantick on why the lack of sketch, shows.
“What are we going to do now?” chanted the cast of Spike Milligan’s Q series. They were prophets. People finally stopped banging on about the death of the sitcom a few years ago when it became apparent that sitcoms were less dead than had been previously supposed. Sketch shows, however, have not been in a […]
Read More → David Quantick cans the laughter and asks, whatever happened to sitcom?
Comedy writers (i.e. people like me) tend to get a bit hot under the collar when the idea of popular comedy is mentioned. Firstly, because with very few exceptions, none of us can write one, and secondly, because as a phrase “popular comedy” is more loaded than a nine month pregnant grenade. For a lot […]
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Andrew McGibbon on why probing the prehistoric polar lake, is best left on ice
As geologists call off their plan to insert a piping hot probe through the earth’s rectal ice cap, to explore a hidden lake beneath the permafrost of Antarctica, we may never discover what, if anything lives in this pristine pool of prehistoric fresh water. This means that an as yet undiscovered species of killer krill, a […]
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